Law school may merge with UMass system

Send this to a friend

Thank you for sharing. Your email has been sent.

Email address of friend (insert comma between multiple addresses):

Your email address:

Copy Me

Add a brief note:

Mary Moore

Officials at the University of Massachusetts Dartmouth announced Wednesday that the Southern New England School of Law has offered to donate to the state university $22.6 million in cash and real estate, including the campus that now houses the 235-student private law school.

If the deal goes through, it would create the first public law school in Massachusetts, said Robert V. Ward, Jr., Dean of Southern New England School of Law. The new school would take on the UMass name, Ward said, and Southern New England School of Law would cease to exist.

The donation offer was made in a letter dated Oct. 5 from the Southern New England School of Law Board of Trustees to UMass president Jack M. Wilson. According to a press release issues by UMass, the state university will undertake a “comprehensive review” of the offer.

Informal discussions have been underway for years between the two schools for such a transition to take place, said Ward. “We’ve had an interest in helping UMass create a law school, so this is a step in the process,” he said. No particular event prompted Southern New England Law School to formalize its offer now, he said.

Ward said that Southern New England School of Law’s offer did not come out of financial crisis at the Dartmouth, Massachusetts-based law school.

“We’re being very clear about that,” he said. “We’re coming off a very good year. In a time when layoffs and everything were going on, at the end of the fiscal year, we were able to put a little extra in the paychecks of our employees.”

The law school, which charges $22,000 in tuition, said first-year enrollment came in slightly higher for the 2009-2010 academic compared to the previous year, he said. Southern New England School of Law does not have an endowment, but it does have a line of credit and boasts "lots of other things to make sure if something bad happens that we can respond it,” Ward said.

Ward said he assumes all employees, including himself, will move over to UMass Dartmouth, if the university accepts Southern New England School of Law’s offer. Those sorts of details would be worked out in a final agreement, he said.

“One-plus-one equals three. It’s the combination of resources. Our missions are similar. And so that’s why you do it. Because it improves the lives of everyone,” Ward said. He added that, although the tuition may not go down if Southern New England School of Law becomes part of the UMass system, he is convinced it would not balloon to the $40,000-plus tuitions charged by private law schools throughout the state.

UMass will consider the proposal in two steps, according to a university spokesman. First, officials at the Dartmouth campus will review the proposal and, if they approve, it will be sent to the president's office for review. The lack of a law school is a "conspicuous gap' in the state education system, said the spokesman, who noted there are seven private law schools in the state.

The offer comes five years after a failed proposal was made to bring Southern New England Law School and UMass-Dartmouth together. In December 2004, the UMass system approved a proposal to bring the law school under the umbrella of UMass Dartmouth's continuing-education program. The proposal went to the Massachusetts Board of Higher Education, where it was defeated in early 2005 by board members who questioned whether the structure of the proposal was legal.

If the law school had been placed under the continuing-education umbrella, UMass-Dartmouth would have been able to retain all of the tuition and fees because continuing education programs do not receive state subsidies and, as a result, are expected to be self-sufficient. In contrast, UMass campuses are subsidized by the state and tuition from regularly matriculated students goes directly back to the state, while student fees are kept by each campus that collects them.

On the grounds that UMass-Dartmouth could not legally operate an entire law school under its continuing education program, the state's Board of Higher Education rejected the earlier proposal. The UMass spokesman said that what happened in 2005 likely would impact the type of proposal Southern New England School of Law and UMass-Dartmouth would go about crafting this time around.

Industries:

Comments

If you are commenting using a Facebook account, your profile information may be displayed with your comment depending on your privacy settings. By leaving the 'Post to Facebook' box selected, your comment will be published to your Facebook profile in addition to the space below.